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Contact Information |
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Afghanistan
Soraya Hakim- President Department
of Orphanages
Block of Tahai Maskan, Parwane 3, Kabul, Afghanistan
079321994 or mobile number 070279633
email:aacs2001@yahoo.com
Please note
we do not accept monitary donations.We can only help direct
you to organizations that work with the orphanages.This site
is not an official site of the Afghan Ministry.
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In
1995 Mrs. Hakim was working as the director of the United Nation's
English Language Training Center in Kabul when shelling between
rival warlords reduced the city to rubble, killing an estimated
43,000 people.
In response to the disaster, Mrs. Hakim and her husband turned the
family compound in Kabul into an orphanage and school. The Wafia
Educational and Training Center for Children sheltered up to 700
children at a time.
"People were dying and the children were running around the
streets, with no mother, no father, no nothing," she said.
"It was terrible and unsafe and every day there were people
crying in the streets. I decided to do something very little, to
educate some of the children. We gave our home and our furniture
to the school."
The United Nations closed its offices in Kabul and relocated to
Pakistan. Mrs. Hakim stayed to teach at the school but at the end
of 1995 Mr. Hakim had been appointed a position in Washington DC
and they moved to the US. In 1996 when Kabul fell to the Taliban,
Soraya and her husband moved to Southern California where she was
very active in the community promoting awareness of the plight of
the children. She and other family members kept the school running
by sending $6,000 per year in donations to pay the staff.
When Kabul was taken over by theTaliban the girls were kicked out
of the school. Still, the school remained open, and the headmaster
regularly sent videotapes of daily life there to Mrs. Hakim in California.
The images were shot in secrecy as the Taliban didn't allow videotaping.She
returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to help the orphans. Before long
she was appointed the position of President of the Department of
Orphanages. She prides herself in being the mother of over ten thousand
children. |
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